Against School

When I first began reading John Gratto’s Against School I thought it was a leaning on the side of outrageous. I felt like I was listening to a conspiracy theorist more than an authority on the education system. I have to say as I read more and more of his essay, I started to see a correlation between his thoughts on the education system and the actual problems affect our nation’s schools. Is our nation’s school system really striving to make good people? Does it really go out of the way to foster leadership, individualism, or even help an individual become the best that they can be? I took class on social problems; my professor taught me that every social problem exists because it benefits someone in some way. The same may hold true for our education system. If a nation is dummed down, it would be easier to control and mislead its people. This means that a poor education system could be more useful to our nation then a good one. Maybe we are blaming the wrong things for faulty education in this country. Maybe the teachers, the lack of funding, and the parents aren’t to blame after all. Maybe it’s simply in the structure of our American school system and maybe it’s that way on purpose. After all, it was derived from the Prussian education system. Or maybe we simply ignore the fact that it’s an obsolete system that needs to be revised. It would take a lot of work and rethinking to truly change the system. Grattos thoughts are interesting takes on the education system I never thought of before.
Gatto makes another good point when he says our nation is in essence eliminating maturity. I really liked the way John Gratto puts it when he says “Maturity has been banished from nearly every aspects of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed our need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment as removed the need to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to question”. There is so much truth in that statement. There is no doubt; we as a nation always seek the easy route. I know I am personally guilty of it.
John Gratto makes a lot of points that seem to be way out there, but he also reveals a lot of truths. We are a nation with a faulty education system based on an even worse education system. We are gradually being stripped of maturity. We are consumers by and large and we have a tendency to not want to think for ourselves. I’m not sure that John Gatto and I see eye to eye totally but I agree with him on that part. I like his final point, that we should teach our own to be leaders and critical thinkers. We need to be aware of our educational systems short comings and we need to fill in the blanks. We ourselves need to become better examples.